The number of private-sector managed charter schools has dramatically increased during the past decade as the corporate education reform Cartel has funded the election of Republican-controlled state legislatures and governors across the nation. The current status of charter schools was leveraged in 2009 when Republican operatives created a national plan for redistricting state legislative and Congressional districts to give Republicans a distinct advantage in political races.

Since that time, as David Daley noted in his recently published book, Ratf***ed (The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy), the initial scheme cost just $30 million dollars and has resulted in Republicans gaining control of 31 state legislative chambers, 25 states where Republicans have a trifecta (control of both houses of the legislature and the governorship), and Republican majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Nearly all of these Republicans, and a rising number of Democrats, have lined up to support corporate charter schools that the Cartel has been systematically turning into corporate profit centers. Below is a brief analysis of how charters have come to be a force in K-12 public education.

What Charters Were Supposed To Be: Charter schools were conceived in 1974 by the late University of Massachusetts education professor, Ray Budde, and began being formed in the early 1990s. The late Al Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), was an early champion and promoter of teacher - and community-centered charters as a way to focus on low-income, under-performing students, and allowing for innovative approaches to their instruction. But by 1995, he had soured on the concept as he recognized that corporations were moving into the charter school sector to refocus them as profit centers.

Thus, a well-intentioned educational concept has morphed into an emerging education tsunami that is wreaking further economic and social devastation in low-income communities—predominantly those of color. As of 2010, approximately eighty percent of charter schools established has been in small and large urban centers where African American and Hispanic students are the overwhelming majority of the student populations.

Urban Targets for Corporate Charters: The major targets of corporate charters are: Chicago; Boston; Cleveland; New York City; San Francisco; Newark and Camden, New Jersey; Los Angeles; New York; Philadelphia; New Orleans; and Washington D.C. and numerous others. Additionally, there has also been a precipitous decline in the number of teachers of color in these cities. Moreover, the distinguished University of Chicago professor, Charles M. Payne, has stated, charter schools are “mediocre interventions that are only accepted because of the race of the children served.” In other words, poor parents and community leaders have been steamrolled by their own legislative representatives and other legislators all of whom are funded by the Cartel to pass school choice legislation.

Furthermore, the Cartel, comprised of the Koch Bros.; Betsy DeVos (President-Elect Donald Trump’s newly selected education secretary); the Walton, Gates, Arnold, Fisher, and Bradley Foundations; and an army of CEOs have formed and subsidized grassroots organizations and marketing schemes (TV and radio ads and free laptops) to appeal to urban parents for their support of corporate charters and other school choice initiatives. At the same time, the Cartel’s legislative surrogates have substantially reduced funding for public education in the states Republicans control, severely limiting the ability of urban school districts, which serve disproportionately poor student populations, to meet the academic and social needs of their pupils.

North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Michigan have been at the forefront of this reduced funding for public education. In Michigan, Betsy and Richard DeVos have jointly led the effort to massively defund public schools and replace them with corporate charters, to a large extent, in five majority-minority school districts: Benton Harbor, Detroit, Highland Park, Muskegon, and Benton Harbor. The DeVos’s also bankrolled the legislature to remove nearly all measures of charter school accountability and to enable non-certified teachers to teach in Detroit (which is not allowed anywhere else in Michigan), while claiming that this scenario provides minority parents with optimum and high quality school choice.

This charter school scam has been perpetrated by a number of movies extolling the virtues and the academic success of charter schools; three of the most prominent are: The Cartel (2009), The Lottery (2010), and Waiting for Superman (2010). Waiting for Superman was heavily advertised and nominated for an Academy Award. President Obama also hosted the students (who appeared in the film) and their parents at the White House after he signed Race to the Top (RTTT) into law, which increased the number of charter schools nationwide, giving them a major boost.

In reality, however, roughly 17 percent of charter schools perform better than public schools, 37 percent perform significantly worse, and 46 percent perform about the same as their surrounding public schools. This occurs despite the fact that charter schools have the freedom to counsel out, expel, and remove students without a due process hearing. For example, researchers at the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) found that 40 percent of African American males who enrolled in the widely heralded KIPP Public Charter Schools do not survive to graduate. And a substantial number of charter school students return to the public schools in their service area from which they came during each school year.

Charter Opponents’ Dilemma: Even with these statistics, opponents of charters still believe that there are enough high performing charter schools with whom they can collaborate. These activists and some unions maintain this view irrespective of the aforementioned data. They fail to recognize the fact that all charter schools define themselves as high performing, along with the print and broadcast media, and no one seems to challenge this falsehood. For example, Michigan charter schools in the low-income communities of color annually rank in the lowest percentiles of public school performance.

Neither Gov. Rick Snyder, state legislators, nor Betsy and Dick DeVos have made any attempt to address this issue. These poor academic outcomes in Michigan’s charter schools have been repeated in Philadelphia and Chester, Pennsylvania; Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; and Newark, Trenton, and Camden, New Jersey. Nonetheless, public education stakeholders remain committed to working with so-called successful charters when the absolute numbers of such schools continue to decline. Corporate charter operators benefit financially and in public relations as long as their adversaries acknowledge that there are many good charters.

These naive views serve to prop up a deeply flawed alternative educational system that is now openly victimizing poor children and denying them equal opportunity for a thorough and efficient education. Supporters of public education persist in the belief that the corporate education reform Cartel will “play fair” while watching privatization advocates reduce accountability for charter schools, commit fraud and theft of public dollars, and leave children in poverty on their own—educationally, socially and economically.

In the interim, the Cartel members will continue to cash the charter school checks.